Wines and Meads, from "both sides of the pond" plus a few bits of other fermented food/drink

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Fermentation re-start - update

Ok, so after what is it? 3 days or so, my canned strawberry has restarted fermenting, and I've just put the last of the stuck ferment onto the restarted part of the must. It seems to be bubbling fine. I'm expecting it to ferment to dry as I used EC 1118 yeast to do the restart - it's a champagne yeast that should ferment the sugar to a maximum of 18 % abv.

Unfortunately the "Winter Mead" didn't want to restart. I'm suspecting that this may have been because it had already fermented about as far as it wanted too and the alcohol content was about as high as the original yeast would go, but there was also already some residual sweetness.

So what I've done with that, is to blend it together in a bucket with the honey water I was using to try to restart the ferment, then I've added a couple of litres of vodka, that's mainly to bash the sweetness down a bit (when I say sweetness it's mainly the fruit flavour sweetness of the original apple juice, cranberry juice and frozen cranberries I used in the recipe). So it'll still be quite fruity, but it's now in 4 demi-johns, with bubbler valves just in case there is any further fermentation, but mainly so it can start to clear naturally. If it doesn't clear in a month or two I'll probably bang it with some finings to clear it that way. It's not gone as well as I'd hoped but it's not a problem because it isn't infected in any way and tastes fine. I'll see what happens when it's aged for at least 6 months. I'll have to rack it off anyway, so I'll have a taste then.